Why social media is being used as a weapon

Most of us have a love/hate relationship social media. It can be a wonderful thing; but it’s also a huge time waster. It can bring people together as well as tear them apart.

It’s no surprise to learn social media has the power to hurt. The impact of cyber bullying can have devastating outcomes. Offensive remarks, defamatory or sexual comments and images are the norm in cyberspace where people operate by their own rules. But there are other ways people use social media to attack and upset those in their inner circle in very subtle ways.

And ‘school mums’ seem to be in the very thick of using social media as a weapon.

‘Louise’ was part of a mum’s group that seemed very tight. The women all supported each other, helping taxi kids around from sporting events and birthday parties.

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“We all enjoyed each other’s company and, once a month, we’d organise a ‘mum’s night out’ where we’d meet up at one of our houses for drinks and dinner. It was something I always looked forward to,” Louise says.

But then Louise had a minor spat with one of the mothers, ‘Tina’ over a very trivial incident involving a maths tutor.

“I wouldn’t even call it an argument, it was more an inconvenience that I caused by changing the time the tutor came to my house which, in turn, mucked up Tina’s schedule and she took great offence.”

The next thing Louise knew, she’d been excluded from the next ‘mum’s night.’ How did she find out? On social media, of course.

The women, she now dubs the ‘mean mums’ posted photos of their dinner party on Facebook – knowing that she would see everything.

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“I couldn’t believe it!” Louise says. “I think the comment was something like, ‘Best night with the best friends.’ It sounds childish of me, but I was so upset I cried. Why would they deliberately exclude me but shove the photos in my face like that?”

Teenagers are arguably the masters of using social media ‘subtweets’ to target specific people with indirect language that will only mean something to the target.

But there’s no denying adults indulge in this shoddy behaviour too. For example, if you’re angry with a friend but don’t have the guts to confront them, your status might read, ‘True friends don’t stab each other in the back.’

It might mean nothing to anybody else, but it will strike at the heart of the person who was supposed to see it. The target will feel the punch but can do nothing to defend themselves. Meanwhile, people are busily clicking ‘like’ which only adds to the pile on and escalate the drama.

And, if the target confronts the original poster, they can easily feign surprise and say, “Well, I wasn’t referring to you.”

Another school mum, Lisa, told me she’d confided in a friend that her son had received a dreadful Naplan result and she’d helped him recover from his embarrassment by throwing it in the rubbish.

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“I was surprised to see the friend posted that night on social media a photo of her own son proudly holding his Naplan results and a big post on how proud she was of him and how intelligent he is. That’s fine, she’s allowed to be proud of her son for his achievements. But she tagged me and my son in the post. Why? It felt like she was rubbing salt in our wounds just hours after I’d confided in her.”

We’ve all seen dreadful things on social media as people strive for social power, social media has undoubtedly changed the way we relate to each other. I have a friend who is kind and warm to people on Facebook but, in the real world, she’s skilled in verbally berating the very people she praises online.

I also have a friend who is the opposite – she can be very bitchy online yet she wouldn’t dream of saying the things he manages to get away with on Twitter.

But it’s not just teenagers who don’t think before they fling their feelings into cyberspace – adults are just as capable of hurting others and using social media to exert a strange kind of power over the person they wish to ‘put in their place.’

I regularly tell my children that life was a lot easier and less stressful without social media. It’s a message I believe many adults need to listen to as well; and if you feel like you’re being mistreated by so-called friends, there’s a good reason why the block and unfriend buttons exist.